In what is expected to be the wedding and social event of the year in India, Bollywood actors Saif Ali Khan, 42, and Kareena Kapoor, 32, are finally tying the knot in elaborate ceremonies spanning several days.

“Saifeena,” as they’re popularly known, come from two of India’s most illustrious families – combining old fashioned princely aristocracy and cinematic Bollywood royalty with a literary lineage thrown into the mix.

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Mr. Khan is the son of the late Mansoor Ali Khan, Nawab of Pataudi (one of the princely states in British India) and Bollywood actress Sharmila Tagore (great grand niece of Nobel prize winning Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore.) Ms. Kapoor is granddaughter of the legendary actor Raj Kapoor, making her a member of one of the most established families in Bollywood history.

The gossip pages of Indian newspapers and magazines are predictably focusing on the glitz and glamour of the event, but it is noteworthy that there’s a 10-year age gap between the new bride and groom. Mr. Khan will join the club of successful older men marrying attractive and accomplished younger women, rather like Hollywood icon Humphrey Bogart marrying the much younger Lauren Bacall (they had a quarter century age difference.)

Ironically enough, Mr. Khan has also been on the other side of the aisle, as it were, in his previous marriage. His partner then was Amrita Singh, a former Bollywood actor, who was 12 years his senior (he was only 21 at that time.) In popular parlance, Mr. Khan has gone from being “cradle robbed” to becoming the proverbial “sugar daddy.” A less kind interpretation would deem Ms. Singh to have been a “cougar,” along the lines of Hollywood actor Demi Moore who popularized in the Western imagination the trend of older women marrying younger men, when she got together with actor Ashton Kutcher.

Seriously though, the nuptials of Mr. Khan and Ms. Kapoor represent a well established and accepted cultural fact in India and indeed in most other societies: men tend to marry women younger than themselves. According to data collected by the United Nationsthe largest gap for first marriages in the Middle East and Asia is Bangladesh at 7.2 years, with Pakistan at 5.1 and India at 4.7. In the U.S., the majority of women have husbands who are no more than three years older than them, according to census data.

When you parse the Indian data more closely, a striking picture emerges. In India, according to the 2006 National Family Health Survey, the most recent survey from which data are available, the percentage of women married to men 10-years or more their elder is 16.4%, against 17.9% in NFHS-2 (1998-1999) and also 17.9% in NFHS-1 (1992-93).

Of the percentage of women ever married (including divorcees and widows), 12% were married to men 10-14 years older, and 4% to men who were 15 years or older. Only 2% married younger men. Also, the younger a woman is when she’s married, the more likely she will be marrying a man 10 or more years older than her — from 19% (if below 15 years), to 17% (15-17), and 9% (25 and above). Overall, these patterns remained remarkably stable across the three rounds of the NFHS, reconfirming that the pattern of older men marrying younger women is an engrained feature of Indian society.

Why do older men marry younger women? Or, to put it in more feminist terms — to the extent that they actually have a choice of marriage partner — why are younger women willing to marry older men?

The usual answer economists studying marriage provide goes under the fancy name of “positive selection.” In everyday language, that means successful and prosperous older men are able to attract and wed desirable younger partners and those younger partners in turn see this as a way of climbing the socio-economic ladder. (It’s not evident to me that Ms. Kapoor would sign on to such an interpretation, as she’s successful and prosperous in her own right and clearly no “gold digger.”)

As it happens, data from the U.S. doesn’t support this conventional wisdom. According to a recent academic study by economists Hani Mansour and Terra McKinnish, men’s earnings are actually lower, holding other factors constant, when the age gap with their spouse is bigger (whether she’s older or younger.) The scholars’ explanation is that well-to-do and better educated men are likely to interact with women roughly their age, whereas men who are in a professional or social circle with much older or younger women are likely to be poorer and less educated.

In contrast, a study using Indian data supports the intuition that the phenomenon of older men marrying younger women carries an economic premium. Anja Sautmann, an economics professor at Brown University, has documented that the age gap is correlated with larger dowry payments from a bride’s to a groom’s family, suggesting that when a younger woman hooks up with an older man, she’s marrying “up” in socio-economic terms and her family is willing to pay for the privilege.

Of course, Ms. Sautmann’s study deals with average Indians of modest means. It doesn’t speak to Bollywood A-listers such as Mr. Khan and Ms. Kapoor who appear to be evenly matched in socio-economic terms (although Ms. Kapoor will now be able to style herself a Begum, the wife of a Nawab.) Nonetheless, a dynastic match such as theirs may convey its own economic benefits to the extent that fans of one or the other star, or both, are entranced by the union, and become fans of “Saifeena.”

This can only be good for their respective brands, which in turn will be good at the box office. Now that’s economics that Bollywood most certainly understands.

Rupa Subramanya writes Economics Journal for India Real Time. You can follow her on Twitter @RupaSubramanya.

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